Hasta La Creative!

Fresh off of nabbing general market ad duties from Mother NY for Burger King earlier this month, Culver City, CA-based agency Pitch has made some moves within its creative department. Most notably, the agency has promoted Xanthe Wells, most recently executive creative director, to the role of chief creative officer. Wells (pictured above) joined Pitch as ECD in early 2013 after spending over seven years at TBWA\Chiat\Day L.A., where she worked with clients ranging from Kraft to Pepsi. The new CCO replaces Eric Springer, who left Pitch for the top creative gig at Draftfcb last year.

Along with the Wells promotion, Pitch has also welcomed aboard fellow Chiat LA alum Gage Clegg, who, along with his significant other, Becca Morton, parted ways with the latter agency last spring (but subsequently stayed on as GCD). Clegg joins up with Pitch as group creative director.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

With a cute canine-powered commercial from Budweiser chewing up its competition ahead of the big game, I decided to ask dog expert Brian Hare why a pooch is so often an adman's best friend.

"We share a lot of history with dogs that we do not share with any other animal," says Hare. "We've been evolving together for tens of thousands of years. This creates a special connection that is unique to our two species."

Judging from his pedigree, Hare should know. He serves as the director of the Canine Cognition Center at Duke University and co-founder of Dognition, a service dedicated to helping pet owners understand how their dogs think. (Ad shop McKinney helped create the service and its website.) With his wife, Vanessa Woods, Hare co-wrote The New York Times' best-seller The Genius of Dogs.

Sure, dogs are cute, but Hare believes there are deeper reasons that consumers respond so strongly, and in such positive ways, to ad campaigns that feature these animals.

"When you see a dog," he says, "it's not like looking at a tiger or a shark. It's like looking at someone familiar, someone you know and recognize. This sense of familiarity and comfort is very valuable to advertising."

That's certainly true for Budweiser's "Puppy Love," a 60-second commercial from Anomaly that tells the tale of a 10-week-old puppy who keeps escaping from an adoption center and cozying up to the Clydesdales on a nearby farm. The spot debuted on Wednesday's Today show, and in just over 30 hours online, "Puppy Love" is nearing 20 million YouTube views, making it by far the most-watched 2014 Super Bowl ad released prior to the game. It's also fetching massive feel-good buzz for the brand in social and mainstream media.

"This year's Budweiser commercial with the Clydesdales and puppy creates a very heartwarming story, pulling out all the stops and using our relationship with both of these animals very effectively," Hare says. "Seeing a dog brings up positive feelings that no other animal can to the same extent. Horses convey power and grace."

Overall, he says, the puppy-horse combo creates "incredibly strong positive feelings around the brand."

But, doggonnit, this year's Super Bowl is also big on bears, with ursine incursions into commercials for Chobani, Beats Music and CarMax. (Actually, CarMax displays some puppy power too, with a Web version of its "Slow Clap" game day spot retitled "Slow Bark" and recast with pooches.) Elsewhere in animal-related big game ads, a bull-ish bachelor horns in on Chevy's Silverado and Audi breeds the Doberhuahua, a freakish mutant mutt.

Hare maintains that no other critters meet advertiser needs quite like dogs (real ones, not CGI-created Doberman-Chihuahua hybrids on a rampage). He says the combination of cuteness and familiarity helps bowsers win every time, even over the cotton-tailed charms of bunnies. (Perhaps a surprising assertion from a guy named Hare.)

Should some animals be barred from ads entirely? "Depending on the ad's intent, snakes are something to be wary of." Hare's also no fan of primates in commercials "because the abuse of chimpanzees is well documented within the entertainment industry."

So what about the Internet's favorite animal, the cat?

The feline fiends inexplicably get a couple of showcases on Sunday They'll hiss and spit, I imagine, across Hallmark Channel's Kitten Bowl, and cough up hairballs on Animal Planet's Kitty Half-Time Show—which is just an intermission during the cable network's Puppy Bowl anyway.

According to Hare: "Even though cats have also been companion animals for thousands of years, our relationship with dogs seems to be particularly extraordinary in comparison. Research shows that dogs can read our gestures, feel our emotions and even sense changes in our health better than most cats."

There, science proves it: When it comes to ads at least, cats aren't up to scratch.

Giant Pepsi hands play the Manhattan Bridge like a guitar in this spot to air just before Bruno Mars kicks off his Pepsi-sponsored halftime show. Or maybe it’s a harp.

The ad was created by Mekanism and co-directed by Mill+.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Já acostumada a produzir conteúdo de forma consistente para a internet, a GoPro fará sua primeira incursão no intervalo comercial mais caro do mundo.

Para tanto, a marca relembra outra ação publicitária: o salto espacial de Felix Baumgartner para Red Bull, em 2012. No evento, sete cameras GoPro HERO2 documentaram o pulo.

O comercial é apenas um resumo de 30 segundos do vídeo abaixo, que conta a história do ponto de vista da GoPro, e tem 8 minutos de duração.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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Le studio Me&Him&You a été fondé par Peter O’ Gara & Ronan Dillon. Ils ont décidé de réaliser une série de posters des grandes villes du monde, montrant les plus hauts bâtiments de chacune d’entre elles. Des créations minimalistes limitées à 400 exemplaires chacune, représentant ainsi Londres, Berlin ou Paris.

When it comes to Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show, will you stay or will you go (to another channel, to the bathroom, on a beer run, etc.)? Ad Age worked with Networked Insights, a marketing-technology company that advises brands on audience targeting and content strategy, to track social-media sentiment surrounding headliner Bruno Mars and guest band the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Scroll down below the graphic for some notes.

Networked Insights tracks sentiment across the social web, including Twitter and Facebook, as well as forums and blog posts.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Everyone who works in an ad/PR agency has to go beyond being a good marketer to being a good businessperson on behalf of our clients.

That may sound like old news to some of you, but the time has come to apply added substance to the words. It’s time for agency employees to think as their clients do and make decisions accordingly — to anticipate a clients’ needs and be able to act on gut instincts.

I am sure you hear from clients that they value your passion and commitment to growing their business. But are they also telling you that they need to see better alignment between your agency’s thinking and their priorities? If not, you can be sure they are thinking it.

Continue reading at AdAge.com